On Fairy-Beyond-Stories

In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien opines that “in human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature.” But do his own definitions allow for more? Taking art by M.C. Escher and Tolkien’s own poetry as examples, I would argue that Faerie and Fantasy can indeed go beyond literature, but the path becomes fraught upon abandonment of story.

To begin, it will be necessary to reiterate the difference between these three elements in relation to my topic. Faerie, the realm somehow coexisting with or overlaying our own, possesses magic and the ability for subcreation, which leads into fantasy. The most important aspects of Tolkien’s Fantasy for my argument are “arresting strangeness” and the potential for Secondary Belief, but I also accept and support the dictionary definition he eschews, “inner consistency of reality.” Lastly, though it may seem inane, a fairy-story must be a story. In order to make room for the values fairy-stories offer – Fantasy, Escape, Recovery, and Consolation – and the paramount feature of the Eucatastrophe or turn, the story must have an enthralling plot. To return tangentially to a prior discussion, these last three are also why fairy-stories are journeys. Recovery, that “regaining of a clear view,” comes only after we are overwhelmed with sensation, stepping back at last after the intense plot which drew us in has been completed. If you will indulge me a quote from the movies,

It's like in the great stories…. [S]ometimes you didn't want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, … when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.

Fairy-stories immerse readers in a “perilous” world with dangers and possibilities beyond our experience. It is exactly because those fantastic characteristics that, if successful, the story fosters real and strong emotion, and that returning to the world which we do experience gives us recovery and catharsis. Even more poignant are stories where the characters feel the same, such as both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. When the heroes return from their journeys, they too gain a renewed perspective on the Shire and home. Eucatastrophe requires a plot on the simple grounds that the “Consolation of the Happy Ending” needs something to end. Without a journey, without conflict and development and the feeling of having gotten somewhere or done something during the story, there can be nothing to “turn” from.

Tolkien critiques fantasy in visual arts as frequently sliding into “silliness or morbidity.” While I do not, of course, know his views on M.C. Escher or what he categorized as silly and morbid, the impossible, imagined worlds of Escher’s drawings are neither. Waterfall and Ascending and Descending, two of his most famous works, display this well.

When the hypothetical viewer’s eye first falls on Waterfall, it will focus on some small element perhaps the waterwheel in the middle, or the sharp polyhedral figures near the top. Between the dark bricks of the aqueduct and the implied motion of ripples, the viewer will likely follow the water around its course before stopping in confusion. Something is obviously not right, and yet the picture does not look completely wrong. I argue that this feeling, though I only have empirical data from my friends to support its existence, is a manner of Secondary Belief created inside the drawing. There is both sense and nonsense in the piece, and a shift of perspective is required to move between them; looking at any part of the structure closely it is comprehensible, a study in architecture, and only by switching to consider the whole can the viewer keep the impossibility in mind. A similar design is at play in Ascending and Descending: look at any half of it and you see people going up and down a staircase atop a lovely Italianate building, but look at the whole and the building ceases to cohere. If Secondary Belief is when unrealistic things can become “’true’: [they accord] with the laws of that world,” then these drawings create belief because the elements do make sense and fit together. This shift in perspective is like the Magic of Faerie, a mathematical magic if you will. Inside of its enchantment, these drawing achieve and inner consistency of reality and the strange seems natural. The bottom left of Waterfall, for instance, has a collection of shapes more suited to a fish tank, but in place with the building and gate it becomes but a transformed garden – similar to real life but shifted, like a green sun. Escher’s realistic and precise architecture and surroundings are a match for the abnormal elements and diminish their shock.

In The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, a collection of poems with many of “less serious” nature, one striking piece after reading this essay is #3, “Errantry.” I linked the poem at the end, but since it was not assigned reading I will quote some of the lines that caught my attention here:

He wove a tissue airy-thin
to snare her in; to follow her
he made him beetle-leather wing
and feather wing of swallow-hair
He caught her in bewilderment
with filament of spider-thread;
he made her soft pavilions
of lilies, and a bridal bed
of flowers and of thistle-down
to nestle down and rest her in;
and silken webs of filmy white
and silver light he dressed her in.
…
He made a shield and morion
of coral and of ivory,
a sword he made of emerald,
and terrible his rivalry
with elven-knights of Aerie
and Faerie, with paladins
that golden-haired and shining-eyed
came riding by and challenged him.

When I read this I found clear parallels with the type of fairies and stories depicting them that Tolkien derides, with the excerpt from Nymphidia echoing in my head. Here is a passage referencing objects made from things befitting a fairy of diminutive stature, full of “prettiness.” The meter, though unique and clever, is made for decorative language and obscure words that, to me at least, evoke the same generically old-fashioned time period as fragile and delicate flower fairies. The poem follows a courier who wanders around, woos a butterfly, and engages in battle before going back to delivering his message. It is altogether a rather nonsensical and unengaging story more reminiscent of “Pigwiggenry” than fantasy.

To me, “Errantry” does feel more like Faerie than Escher’s drawings. Perhaps it is just the romantic medieval imagery, or perhaps it gets to Tolkien’s point that fantasy is best in language where the audience can envision it themselves. Nonetheless, the poem does not create secondary belief in its world nor show much consistency besides prettiness. So why might pictures succeed where the written word fails? My argument is that, even though neither has enough plot for escape, recovery, consolation, or eucatastrophe, the difference is still in the story. The poem is too involved in meter and rhyme to go anywhere, and furthermore what story it does have is like the beast-fables Tolkien describes: all can be transformed into human items, materials, and experiences, stripping it of the fantasy. Meanwhile, in these two and other Escher drawings, we capture a slice of life. People are moving around their house, looking over balconies, doing laundry, and all while existing in an enchanted Faerie realm. The art is not simply an exploration of form, it is situated in a world, and this truly is the key to secondary belief.
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There are obviously other points that could be considered, but I am already long even without the poem excerpt. “Errantry” and many of the other poems in the collection were likely composed for Tolkien’s children. As he said in letter 215, he sometimes fell victim to societal assumptions that children and fairy-stories went together, so should we excuse the poem’s imagery and frivolity? I should also note that The Adventures of Tom Bombadil are presented as marginalia from the Red Book of Westmarch, and a cyclical structure of the language is a part of this Hobbitish poem type, which may excuse the cyclical plot. What is the purpose of the framing device? Surely he doesn’t actually expect anyone to believe these are poems he just collected, and as a way to create a secondary world it is frankly unconvincing. Perhaps Tolkien simply wanted to tie them into the canon on a more meta level.

-- ᛸᚻᚹ (SEP)

http://www.ae-lib.org.ua/texts-c/tolkien__the_adventures_of_tom_bombadil__en.htm#03